Category: Various Finished Work

A quickie of Wren from depression comix. Some of you might know her as “freckled girlfriend”. I’ll probably put it up on the depression comix site at some point but I have to work on reorganizing the gallery there.

This was done as a pencil sketch which I scanned and just threw some layers of PhotoShop color on top.

Just need something more colorful here… everything is in greyscale lately.

I inked and colored a previous sketch. This was colored entirely on a Galaxy Note 2 in a subway under Tokyo. The tools were limited but it looks okay. A little weird coloring this while being crushed by complete strangers. I’d still like to do this comic some day, along with a whole bunch of other comics as well. Maybe someday I will.

It was 1999 and I was in love, so I drew the person I was in love in this picture. I was a huge fan of Maison Ikkoku so I wanted to draw Godai and Kyoko for this. Unfortunately for me, I confused sex for undying love, and it ended badly, so badly that I have very few of the friends I had at the time still talking to me today. Okay, this commentary became a lot sadder than it needed to be but regardless of the depression and all that I still believed in love and passion, and it was one of the things that still gave me hope.

When I was still living in Canada, there were a group of local anime-inspired artists and we put together a doujinshi to sell at Anime North that year. Most of us contributed a full pic for the cover collage and a story inside, and this was my full pic for the cover. It was inspired by Sakara Tsuushin, a manga by U-Jin. It started a weird thing where I would draw women sitting on wooden floors.

For this piece I used an ancient piece of Adobe software to smooth the black lines, and colored it completely on GIMP with a mouse (how I did most of my work back then until I had the sense to buy Photoshop and a tablet in 2000).

2005 is when depression struck hard. I was living in Gunma at the time in a sparsely furnished two bedroom apartment. There were a number of factors that contributed to this, but my 2005 spell was probably the worst of my life. I didn’t have much support, and the friends I did have I was actively cutting out of my life so they didn’t have to deal with me. Space Coyote was probably one of my best friends at the time and we chatted constantly. However, depression tells you that you don’t need friends so I said some things I really shouldn’t have. It cost me a dear friend I’ll never get back, but she was really better off without me in her life.

This particular piece was something I was working on for her just before our final conversations. I’ll keep it here as a reminder of one cost of depression.

I’m not sure why I did this piece back in 2000, I believe I wanted to see how I could put together a drawing and a photograph and make it work. The photograph is mine, taken from the Bruce Trail in Ontario Canada, and manipulated so it doesn’t feel so out of place.